Digging Deep. Approvals Are Nothing. Shovels in the Ground Are Everything. Louis Shalako.

This building is under construction at 1550 Venetian Boulevard, Pt. Edward, Ontario.

Louis Shalako

Approvals are Nothing. Shovels in the Ground Are Everything.

Locally, approvals for housing developments of all kinds add up to either 2,400, or even 3,500, depending on who you ask, or maybe just in how we choose to define them. Yet there are very few shovels in the ground. Some of the approvals go back so many years, they have been forgotten.

So, how many affordable, geared-to-income units has the County of Lambton built in the last twelve months? Three, ladies and gentlemen…just three. Habitat for Humanity is doing a better job than that, although mere charity can never be a solution for low-cost housing. It doesn’t even work that well for poverty…

The former Bayside Mall was successfully demolished, and a new building put up for Shared Services and the Ministry of Community and Social Services. Driving by, at some point, one began to wonder at the lack of progress. The Covid-19 pandemic put a hold on a lot of projects. But this one never started up again. No further work has been done, and an announcement has been made that the whole thing is off, whether that is temporary or permanent is a good question. It’s a big, flat area in the middle of downtown, and nothing is happening there.

Affordable, Geared-to-Income Indigenous Housing at 940 Confederation St. has been delayed due to unexpectedly high construction costs. (40 units)

St. Demetrios Church on Murphy Road has hit a roadblock due to funding program changes. (Up to 46  units)

Former Devine St. School to become senior’s housing.(100 units)

An elected official has stated that there was a change in ownership. Whether that means the land or the company have been sold, or whether one or more partners walked away, is unclear.

Former St. Peter’s School to become senior’s housing.(104 units)

Former High Park Church to become affordable housing. (20-23 units)

Housing eyed for former St. Paul’s Church in Sarnia. (Unknown number of units)

Developer has plans for the historic Central United Church. (10-15 accessible units)

Out of the Cold Program to utilize Laurel Lea Church on Exmouth Street. This is a winter-seasonal homeless shelter, with a possible plan for further affordable housing.

So, Kathleen St. has been proposed as the site of some new development for affordable housing. The city owns the land—unfortunately, the county is in charge of social housing, which means that it won’t get built anytime soon, no matter how much fair, impartial and objective news coverage it appears to receive. (50 units)

The city has or is giving away an underused parking lot on Victoria Street, again, the county will be responsible for actually building it. I have a funny feeling that one ain’t going to happen anytime soon. Mayor Mike Bradley, seconded by Councilor Bill Dennis, both members of county council entered a motion challenging Lambton County Social Services to complete any project within eighteen months. This may relate to the council’s response to a request for a study of putting washrooms at Rainbow Park. (See below.)

The county’s project, Maxwell Place, has some serious problems. The project, affordable, geared-to-income housing for vulnerable senior citizens is stalled for the second time. Holes were excavated, foundation work was done. One day all the contractors went home and nothing has been done since. Apparently, the county is looking for a contractor willing and able to complete the project. Which won’t happen as long as litigation is before the courts. Also, people aren’t talking, this is especially true with the possibility or likelihood of litigation before the courts. Another fine mess, whether that has anything to do with the prefab construction methods or what is unknown, however the upper structural modules are said to be in storage locally… (24 units)

So county council, in what appears to be a misinterpretation, refused to put in ‘washrooms’ at the Rainbow Park homeless encampment, when really, portable johns would appear to be desirable as an interim measure. According to Mr. Agar, ‘a city park and a city homeless encampment is a city problem’, I might have had a little more sympathy if the county could actually complete a project of almost any sort, in any sort of time frame, and at almost any sort of cost—

When county council voted pretty much unanimously to fund a five-year study on homelessness and affordable housing shortly after the 2018 election, that was a dead giveaway. And, of course, they can’t do anything until the study is completed, which it was. And it was the most wishy-washy, most waffling sort of document that has been seen in many years around here, with plenty of talk about leveraging synergies and shifting paradigms, and identifying core areas of need, assessing individual requirements and designing one-size-fits-all living spaces, (unless there's something different about you), and partnerships, and stakeholders, and consultations—they can never get enough consultations with stakeholders, ladies and gentlemen. Oddly enough, the only stakeholders not invited are the ones who are actually supposed to live in these places, assuming they ever get one built. In that sense, it’s like the ‘consultations’ undertaken before the legalization of recreational cannabis: the only people who never got to speak were the very people who were supposedly to benefit from said legalization. I may be exaggerating slightly, but I think not—

There are some success stories.

Bayfront is one of a small number of local success stories. It can hardly be described as affordable, even so, it does tend to take the pressure off of other apartments and condominiums in the local area. Presumably, the tenants/lessees aren’t all that interested in home ownership per se, and here, at least on the river side, you have views of the water. Clearly, the tenants can afford to pay the rent.

The Addison is a newly built apartment tower, the property once housed what used to be a grocery store and a department store. It is ‘relatively affordable’, yet no one on disability or welfare could afford even a one-bedroom, even if they had a partner, bearing in mind clients of ODSP lose all or a portion of their ‘shelter portion’, if they attempt to share housing costs. I told the Ministry that this tended to cause homelessness many, many years ago. (They don't care. - ed.) This sort of thing is ‘baked in’ to the legislation. The social workers can’t do much about that, and for governments, Liberal or Conservative, it seems to create some sort of mental block. The result, is that they might study it endlessly, but no one has the guts to take that one big step, which would result in a total, ground-up, nuts and bolts revision of the guidelines. The real problem, is that it costs money, the government is responsible to the taxpayers, and the NIMBYs and nay-sayers are all over the place. They’re down on the riverbank, burning a candle in order to raise awareness of the stigma…etc, etc, etc, and getting some good front-page coverage while doing it.

Looking southeast, London Rd. and Christina St.

The former Sarnia General Hospital Site sat empty and derelict for some years after closure. Homeless people and others were breaking into the site and stealing copper wire, piping, anything that they could turn into a dollar. It was a nightmare for the neighbours, police and the city. The city eventually paid to have it taken down, turned it over to private enterprise, and at least there is semi-detached housing along Elgin Street, and a pair of low-rise towers are presently under construction. They have progressed to the point of brickwork on the exterior, doors and windows are in, one would assume interior finishing work is progressing. What the actual rent scale will be is unknown. The city paid $5.4 million for demolition and the developers paid $1,000.00 for a property estimated at a value of $1.4 million. One hell of an incentive, but maybe that’s what it takes these days.

A development of approximately 154 detached homes is slated for a parcel of land along London Line. A model home appears to have been built. Yet high-end or luxury housing is not going to solve the problem of affordability in this town, this county, or anywhere else in this country. This end of the market really does rely on market forces, rather than any great subsidies from multiple levels of government. This market exists—and the customer can afford to pay the mortgage.

Here’s the County’s own Report Card, in which they give themselves all A’s.

Looking northeast from the same intersection. Churches make bad housing, except for God.

There is a supportive housing thing on London Road. In a recent news story, there were only a small number of at-risk youth in residence. The folks that built it had $1.2 million of their own money to contribute. The money came to some extent from their success with Emergency 401 or something like that.

Here is a proposed combined detached/townhouse development in Petrolia, which seems logical enough as it relies on market conditions and customer demand. It requires some rezoning, which will quickly be granted. This story was published June 6/24. Yet, even if it happens, it does take some time for ‘shovels in the ground’ and the project to come to fruition.

Point Edward Apartment Takes Shape Quickly.

Brush Cleared for Housing in Point Edward.

Former Holmes Foundry Lands Planned for Development.16 Acres in Total.

Poor people study the sports pages. Rich people study the interest rates. The Bank of Canada has just lowered the rate from 5 % to 4.75 %. There are institutional lenders, then there are institutional borrowers. OPM, ‘other people’s money’, a bit of a mantra among entrepreneurs. As my grandfather would have said, don’t bet the farm on it. Very few corporations have a couple of hundred million laying around, just waiting to be thrown at a housing development. This is not like the stock market, where you can make multiple trades a day, totalling in the millions, and perhaps make a quick profit—or a quick loss. There is a time lag. Nothing happens quickly in this industry, and sometimes nothing ever happens at all, even with ‘approvals’. The bigger the project, the longer the time lag. A new development takes time to build, it takes time to sell it out and fill it up, and it takes time to recoup that investment. The real professionals are looking at the ‘split’, how much does it cost to borrow, interest paid, and how long does it take to pay it off—and how long does it take before the development produces a profit for the shareholders. The split is between income and outgo—a word I may have just invented.

When the conditions are right, building and development will begin anew. Until then, not much joy.

Time for analysis. This is where we compare apples, oranges—and green bananas, which as we are all aware, go bad fairly quickly…

First the commonalities. The successful projects were private ventures. Some of the unsuccessful ones were also private ventures. In an assumption, the successful projects had funding secured, arguably, before the pandemic, and before the interest rates started really climbing. Inflation played some role, bearing in mind the Bank of Canada rate was raised from a nominal .25 % up to 5 %, all of which happened in a very short time. However, if you and your bank had signed a contract, and approved your funding at a given rate, the bank will honour that contract unless it is time-limited. Use it or lose it, in other words.

Some, but not all of the unsuccessful projects may not have had their funding secured. They may not have had funding at all, relying on government grants and low or zero-interest loans. Some of those programs were also time-limited. Any government program has only so much funding. It is first come, first served with some of these programs.

Some of the ‘unsuccessful’ projects may not have been the result of serious intention. If you’re trying to interest buyers in your property, the fact that you have perhaps gotten some variance in the zoning or other bylaws, the fact that some pie-in-the-sky project has been approved by a municipal or county council, might carry some weight with potential purchasers.

Some of the even more unsuccessful projects may represent fantasy more than reality. This especially applies to old churches. The congregation may no longer be able to support the costs of such a building, and the mother church may have gone bankrupt.

Yet they hate like hell to see the thing torn down as well. It’s a perfectly good building and a perfectly good cause, right?

In a previous story, I discussed the difficulty of converting the classic 1960s elementary school to housing, and the issues sort of double or triple if the thing is multi-story, for example the old SCITS here in Sarnia, on Wellington Street. Some folks thought it was a no-brainer for affordable housing. Assuming relatively low rents as ‘affordable’ any economic case, not even for profit, just to keep the building going over the longer term, is unsustainable. Affordable rents do not cover the costs of an unaffordable building.

Locally, several of the churches listed above are huge, very old-fashioned structures. They might even be described as beautiful in their own way. Some of them are historic, but only the bats and the chimney swifts really want to live in that big belfry on the end of the building. The rest of the place represents one big, tall, vast space. That space has no supporting structure. To divide that up into floors will require that structure to be put in place. So now, you’re figuring out how to dig foundations deep into the ground. At the very least, you need to get a backhoe into the building…

The writer is not an engineer, what he does do is to ask questions—or maybe just run a few thought experiments. The writer spent much of his life in construction, and structures are not entirely unfamiliar.

Some very nice people are talking about fundraising. At the risk of being rude or insulting, you can’t fund such a project within any sort of time-frame by running bake-sales or charity bingo games.

(Otherwise the Canadian Armed Forces would be doing it. – ed.)

What they are looking for is public funding, or some rather large donations. Yet the government is not unsophisticated when assessing such requests. Neither are the large donors, and not too many people have ten or twelve or more millions laying around, and if they did, you are really going to have to impress them. You are really going to have to make a case, a good case, for that particular building. So far, this has been unsuccessful.

These are the green bananas, going off rather quickly.

There are actually a few shovels in the ground here in Sarnia-Lambton. The skilled trades, the professional contractors, are the only people who can make things happen in the sense of construction and renovation, and they will go where the money is. For the most part, that is private money, paid by professional developers. Any contracting business runs on money. The skilled trades do not work on charity. They have their own homes, families and their own mortgages to feed.

Update: the county has just offered to buy St. Bartholemew Church, which is in the north end of this city. This may be a bit of a revenge ploy on the part of county, as the NIMBYs and naysayers will be freaking out at the thought of poor people moving into the neighbourhood, bringing down property values. This is where that good old stigma rears its very useful head. Essentially, in this scenario the county looks good and the city will be revealed for what it is. This is why they simply must mention mental health and addictions in any news story of poverty, homeless and disability. There will be endless rounds of consultation, site plans, and there is many a slip between the crouch and the leap, as my old sabre instructor used to say...

Also. I mentioned that some of these approvals go back so many years, they have been forgotten. I had forgotten this long-term care development. It doesn't really fit the definition of affordable housing, except that the elderly are people too. This story dates back to May 3, 2021, where the city sold the land for $250,000.00 and the plan is to replace Sumac Lodge. This land is three kilometres from the original site, which is still open. The site had been shut to new admissions, pending health and safety repairs and upgrades. Also, three years have gone by.  Driving by on the way to work, the location of this land is sort of difficult to confirm, although there are open areas in between homes and businesses.

 

Louis spells councillor with one 'L', my dears.

END

Analysis: Turning Federal Buildings into Affordable Housing. Louis Shalako.

Louis has books and stories available from Google Play in ebook and audiobook formats.

Louis has some art and stuff on Fine Art America.

Note. Louis spells councillor with one letter ‘L’. Other than that, he really is quite all right. – ed.

 

Thank you for reading, and listening.

In Depth. The New Landlord. Louis Shalako.

Readers will forgive us if we don't use an image of our own building.

Louis Shalako

It was Friday, May 31 when the letter was shoved through the door frame. It had my name on it, the letter inside has my name, address and the date.

It’s from the landlord. Please remove your window air conditioning unit.

Okay.

It’s not like I didn’t see you coming—

I reckon at least three or four households in this building received such letters. This is different from the annual and pretty generic folded pamphlets shoved through the door frames of every unit in the building, regular reminders when springtime rolls around.

People basically ignored it, took their chances, and the landlord took no action. Things have changed.

It’s different, in other words. Steeves & Rozema used to operate the building, but a new company, MillDon Enterprises Limited has been spun off. Essentially, S & R continues management of senior living and long term care homes, MillDon handles residential apartment buildings. It’s all the same staff and employees, they said so themselves. It might also be an attempt to deflect bad publicity from the parent company, when the renovictions begin in earnest.

I removed the a/c within ten minutes of finding that letter. Yet I suspect this is just the beginning. It’s more than just a change of style, even though their first letter, also inserted through the door frame on or about May 26, announced the change of management and also assured tenants that ‘your tenancies are secure’.

No one’s tenancies are secure, not when it’s a rent-controlled building and seven households out of thirty-one have not turned over in the thirteen or so years that I have been in this building. In a local news story, it was stated that ‘rents have doubled in six or eight years’. Well, they’ve more than doubled in thirteen.

Okay, walking down the street, we can see that some units have the snorkel visible in the window, this is from a portable air conditioning unit, often on wheels, with a flexible hose. They are more expensive and less effective than the typical window mounted units.

It is also true that the upper floor on this building has the metal sleeve, a box set into the masonry, with a grille on the exterior. In my unit, there is a cover screwed on and while it is a repository for spiders and a source of some damned cold air in winter, the even more expensive ‘sleeve-type air conditioner’ can fit in this space. My own problem, is not insoluble—or unsolvable.

(He’s just cheap. – ed.)

However one wants to say it. It’s just a question of time and money, or perhaps speed, time and distance when you figure out the machine has to come from somewhere, in some sort of a time-frame, bearing in mind we must get some kind of heat-wave, certainly at some point in the summer of 2024. Someone has to lug that fucking thing up three flights of stairs, unbox it, find the tools, and do some kind of credible job of installation. Interestingly, assuming more than one window, and the little portables seem to be good for 150 square feet, I doubt if the landlord will be saving much on the electricity. This is not about the price of electricity. This is about control.

Either we do without, or we get the portable units. Or suffer. Or try our luck elsewhere.

It’s better than lying in a puddle of sweat all night long, going days (or nights), without sleep, or dragging a mattress out onto the balcony, like the couple in Rear Window, which I suspect would also deeply aggrieve the landlord. It tends to bring down the tone of the neighbourhood, don’t you know.

***

(Updated Jun 5/24) $322.00 with tax. Kicking cold air.

In such an environment, temptation reigns supreme. If the landlord even got half of us old-timers out of the building the revenues would go up by three or four thousand dollars per month; maybe even more. This building, by my calculations, is already generating well over fifty thousand dollars a month, but another few grand wouldn’t hurt their feelings. What is that, six hundred grand a year…??? From a building that was paid off decades ago, and has been remortgaged multiple times since then, and has been, in general, a cash cow for the last fifty years…

The game will be to get complaints on the tenant. A request, one that is complied with, isn’t exactly a complaint, but that is the way that it will be presented, when the company goes to make their big play. There will be preliminary steps. They will send around a form, this one will be shoved in through all door frames. Tenants will be asked to provide current phone numbers, email addresses, license plate numbers, the names and number of family members. (Next of kin. – ed.) Your insurance policy number, they will advise you to have comprehensive insurance on your auto just in case one of their branches falls on your vehicle. Your dependents, any pets, waterbeds, aquariums, all that sort of thing.

They will determine which tenants have barbecues on their balconies and ‘request’ that they be removed. When it is time for their annual entry, which is when they change the batteries in the smoke detectors, this sort of compulsory notice is shoved in through the door frame of all units. This is when they walk through the unit and take pictures, and send them back to head office for assessment…they do have the right of inspection, ladies and gentlemen.

And I have the right to write a blog-post. I plead self-defense.

At some point they will re-issue the electronic key fobs and ask to see identification when you go to do so. They’ve already got the place wired for sound with an estimated ten to twelve cameras watching you come and go. This ties in with the tracking feature of the key fob, where they know exactly what time you leave for work in the morning and exactly what time you come home, when you take out the garbage, and also, what with a plastic card to operate what used to be coin-operated machines, now they know all about your laundry as well. They will ask if you’re growing pot on the balcony, visible to children on the street three hundred metres away…

The rentier class has all the power and all of the advantages and one must govern oneself accordingly. To lose housing is to become homeless, possibly for the rest of one’s life the way the provincial government is responding to this issue.

As for the county, they’re having another summit, even as we speak.

I have been thinking of painting my unit…but why in the hell would anyone invest any money at all, in something that would take weeks or months of effort, and a considerable amount of cold hard cash, when the odds are the landlord is looking for excuses…??? If you ask permission, it’s just one more black mark on your record. And if you just go ahead and do it, it’s just one more black mark on your record. If they say no, in writing, they can hardly complain about the paintwork, not after nine years of occupancy. If they say yes, in writing, then you’d better do a damned neat job of it and stick to approved colours. I have no doubt a little communication works better with the average landlord in such a case.

You can also see why I am conflicted. To talk to them at all, is to draw attention.

The building across the street has been vacated for one year. There is virtually no activity from contractors. The thing is basically just deserted. The thing here, is that Steeves & Rozema were at least systematically renovating and upgrading units as they were vacated, singly, one at a time, and as things went along. I would think that just leaves six or seven remaining to be done—a real provocation to the obsessive-compulsive, the sort of person who just wants to get something done, in which case I sincerely hope they are not a psychopath...

I’ve also seen the company truck in here this morning: he came around Friday morning, and later that day, the letters arrived.

Presumably, he’s just checking up on compliance.

It still has the S & R logo on the side, incidentally.

It would be difficult to justify, even to themselves, in renovicting the entire building: after all, my next door neighbours are already paying twice as much for essentially the same unit. Mine’s just a little grubby after nine years on the third floor—and four on the second floor when I first moved in. I am a smoker, I do cook, which includes frying bacon and eggs, French fries, I take showers and baths and other such things. The steam will condense on the walls, taking other airborne pollutants with it. The ventilation has never been exactly good in this old building, a bit of a problem when the heat in the building is set rather low over the winter and to open a window a crack is to essentially freeze in your bed. The same holds true in the heat of summer, up here on the third floor. That whole puddle of sweat thing. With baseboard heaters, simple convection sucks all of that up the face of the walls and some of it is going to stick, ladies and gentlemen.

Here’s my point. The fact that I have been in a rent-controlled unit or building for thirteen years is not my problem, it is the landlord’s…which makes it a problem for me after all.

The fact that there is nowhere else to go, (except Rainbow Park), and that I retire off of disability and go onto rather minimal federal pension benefits and other minor supplements in two months, is definitely my problem. The fact that depression has reared its ugly head again and every little thing feels like a punch in the guts isn’t exactly helpful. Depression is an anxiety-based condition. I would appear to have plenty to worry about, in that sense it is an environmental response to some perceived threat or trauma. 

This is our operating environment.

Click to enlarge.

I also noted this morning, that the rent payment had gone from the bank account. It had also gone up by $1.01. Okay, it’s a new company and a few glitches may be expected due to the sheer number of units, 1,000 all over southern Ontario. This is their first time, in other words. Yet nobody wants to confront the landlord over a measly dollar, and if they have decided to charge a dollar for every e-transfer, that’s another thousand dollars a month coming into company coffers, for essentially nothing. It’s not like they notified anyone about anything, they’d have to put it in writing—and guys like me are known to hang onto such things. I was just downtown this morning, and company headquarters for MillDon Enterprises Ltd. are still plastered with S & R logos. I suppose it all takes time. I’m not sure if they have a website up yet, either.

Other than that—

I plead self-defense…

I believe it was Max Webster who sang about getting used to walking the tightrope. Well, neither federal, nor especially provincial pensions, for example ODSP, have kept up with inflation, even when inflation was low. Disability has always been thirty or forty percent below the poverty line in this province. This is why seventy percent of your cheque goes to rent. The poverty line is currently over $25,000.00 per year and ODSP ain’t nowhere near that. Welfare is so much worse—that one is just a disgrace on the part of the provincial government.

I’ve been walking some kind of tightrope for thirty fucking years, ladies and gentlemen.

Also.

The inflation in the housing sector is something else—it’s just plain crazy and no wonder Rainbow Park has a line of tents several hundred metres long, all along the back fence. I have been told, but have not verified independently, that there are encampments along the Howard Watson Trail as well. The building across the street, where all tenants were evicted as of June 1/23, has been sitting empty for a full year. I haven’t seen contractors in there in months, although someone does cut the grass periodically.

Fuck.

The ability to see the future is highly-overrated. The simple truth is that it hasn’t happened yet, and it may never happen. It is also true that knowledge is power—and to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Getting old ain’t exactly for wussies, what the hell I’m supposed to do about is a very good question. To sit here and live in dread isn’t exactly my idea of the so-called Golden Years.

 

END

Notes. 

Air Conditioning for Tenants. 

Can I Paint My Unit?

If the landlord really wants to push,  there is quite the backlog at the Tribunal.

Steeves & Rozema to Become Separate Operations.

Homelessness Summit Draws Front-Page Coverage, but no Conclusions, All the Usual Excuses.

(Sarnia Observer, Sarnia News Today.)

***

Community Legal Assistance Sarnia. 

Let go the line. Max Webster.

Rear Window. James Stewart and Grace Kelly. One of my top three Hitchcock films.

Backlog at Tenant and Landlord Tribunal. (CBC)

Rainbow Park. (Sarnia Journal) If the police can't evict a homeless encampment, how secure is my tenancy...???

The Cheapest Portable Air Conditioner at Home Depot.

Poor old Louis has books and stories available from Google Play in ebook and audiobook format. Click on an individual title and then click to select either ebook or audio version.

See his works on ArtPal.

The image is of Mary Nolan. 

Thank you for reading, and listening, ladies and gentlemen.

In Depth. What Do We Do With Sarnia Airport. Louis Shalako.

Eighteen passengers, on a good day.

Louis Shalako

What would happen if we gave up Sarnia Airport?

Would we ever be able to replace it? 

How much passenger traffic would it take to sustain Sarnia Airport at a break-even or even profitable level? How much does it even cost, and is there any benefit, in sustaining the thing in limbo for any great length of time. Is there any potential for that sustainable level of air traffic in the local market, barring any great increase in the local population, which doesn’t seem very likely in the short term.

The population of Sarnia and Sarnia-Lambton has been stable, if not stagnant, for many years. We do have a sizable population of foreign students, who may or may not stick around for the longer term. Foreign students are, for the most part, not buying five or six hundred thousand dollar new-build homes, and they don’t take affordable, geared-to-income housing because they aren’t eligible. What they do take, are apartments, in the lower range of the scale in terms of pricing. They take them for the short term, which means when they vacate landlords can take a look at the local going rate and jack the rents accordingly.

How much land is involved in the operation of Sarnia Airport. What happens if the airport loses any certifications that it might have. What are the chances of any major or smaller air-carrier bringing passenger or charter flight services to the Sarnia area? How long can we hang on, waiting for such an outcome.

If we closed Sarnia Airport to any flight operations at all, what would we do with it? Is there any real chance of replacing Sarnia Airport, in some other location, at some future date. That doesn’t seem very likely. Where else would you put it, and if there really are economic benefits, how would we like seeing those benefits going to a neighbouring municipality.

Use it or lose it, in other words.

What value does private flying, what value does a small flight school, what economic or social benefit, or any other public good does that bring to the municipality. If they lost the privilege, where would all the private pilots and flight students go?

What upgrades would be required to bring Sarnia Airport up to snuff, in order to attract any air carrier to the Sarnia area. Where is the demand. Back in the 1960s, ‘Great Lakes Aviation’ operated air services, flying DC-3s of WW II vintage on short, regional routes. These were twin-engine tail-draggers of about 28 passengers. This was superseded by ‘Air Ontario’, flying Convair 440 aircraft; piston-engine, twin-engine aircraft with nose-wheel landing gear. Those were good for 52 passengers, they were noisy, nearing the end of their service life, and no doubt expensive to maintain.

For some years, small, twin-engine turbine aircraft provided the service, for the life of me I cannot recall the name of the company…

In a personal note, my buddy Bill Stone and I rode our little banana bikes out to the airport, from the Bright St. and Germain Park area, when we were twelve or thirteen years old. (It was summer and we fished for catfish and suckers out there in Wawanosh Drain as well.) We went into the ‘new’ terminal and got an airline schedule from the nice lady behind the counter…the security guard sort of grinned and shook his head when he saw us coming. I guess you could say we liked aircraft. We rode out there to see them landing and taking off. It’s probably a good thing our parents didn’t know too much about all this—

The cockpit of the Convair 440.

***

Late on many a hot summer night, with the windows open, laying in bed, one could hear the bigger planes landing at Sarnia Airport. They would put the propellers into reverse pitch, pushing full throttle, in order to brake on the relatively short runway—rather than plunge off the NW end of the runway and fall into Wawanosh Drain. We used to go out there and cluster at the end of the runway when Canada’s Snowbirds came and went, although it has been a while…considering the age of the Tudor training aircraft, perhaps that is understandable. Our age, too.

Some of this was before the opening of the Highway 402 in about 1980. Traffic between Sarnia and London meant travelling on the two-lane, very narrow Highway 22, which did have one centre passing lane—one result of which was head-on collisions when folks misjudged the distance and the speed. This community doesn’t support the costs of passenger rail traffic, it all has to be subsidized at a loss, and one wonders about the intercity bus service as well. It’s all very well to read about it or see it on the evening news. What is it like to actually ride upon it…??? Ten or eleven people on a train going one hundred kilometres, isn’t very profitable, or ticket prices quickly become prohibitive.

***

How much would all that cost, and would the economic, spin-off benefits offset those costs.

This holds true for any form of transportation service.

What would happen if an actual cruise ship, actually docked in Sarnia Harbour…and what would that actually do for downtown…???

What would it do for Bright’s Grove. This is where most of our politicians live, after all.

The real question we need to ask ourselves here, is what would this do for Bright's Grove.

What alternative uses might the existing airport footprint support, bearing in mind Badger Daylighting and other services onsite, and bearing in mind present and future zoning requirements. How does this all fit into the official plan?

Surrounding the airport are areas zoned for agriculture, commercial and light industrial. There are farms and residences along Telfer Road, Michigan Avenue and Blackwell Road. There are businesses along London Line, including the municipal business park.

How would they be affected by major changes to the site, and how would that be perceived. They’ve lived with it this long, what would they think if the land was sold off for some major industrial operation? It is the largest single parcel of land in the city--it is available, in some sense.

Some kind of mega battery or EV plant might fit there—only problem there is, we still lose the airport and the NIMBYs would be well and truly out for blood…

Backtracking just a little bit, there is plenty of room already, for middle-class and high-end housing development.  Called Zone 2, it’s in the official plan. An increase in development land near Bright’s Grove has been rejected the last I have heard. Any form of affordable, geared-to-income housing will be a hard sell in any neighbourhood, this in spite of all the efforts of ineffectual do-gooders, (sandals-wearing, shorts-wearing, floral shirts-wearing, weak and ineffectual, slightly-incompetent socialist bureaucrat-gender-tag-wearing people), going down on the riverbank and burning candles in order to raise awareness of the need to reduce stigma, which they have just reinforced with the success in getting front-page coverage with what is an otherwise bogus endeavour…to put that sort of development in an area that is ‘desirable’, merely rubs salt in the wounds of the long-suffering bourgeoisie. Who, as we all know, have been having it pretty rough lately.

We already have thousands of approvals, very few of which represent ‘shovels in the ground’. Many of them have simply been forgotten.

Perhaps the Ineos/Styrolutions site will come available soon, and of course this is much more suitable when you consider the encampment at Rainbow Park, and the fact that the intersection of Tashmoo and Churchill Road/Highway 40 is so much closer to the addictions and mental health services people require—or does that sound snarky. We could always bus them in—the social workers, I mean.

We could always nail up a sign and call it a ‘leper colony’, or ‘Free Gaza’, or ‘Ford City’, or something like that.

It’s crazy enough, it might just work. Why, that big old airport can house any number of homeless people, in tiny little fibreglass veal-calf sheds, or maybe we could just put in a few hundred McMansions for the Sarnia City Councilor Bill Dennis’s of this world.

 

END

They just liked aircraft.

Badger Daylighting.

So, here’s this story where Council was looking to sell Sarnia Airport.

Here’s a Master Plan for Sarnia Airport. Be prepared for your bum to fall asleep.

This link is from 2018. Some Canadian journalist really ought to follow up.

Okay,leaving Sarnia for Toronto at 8:40 a.m. $48.00VIA rail. One would hope there is some kind of return ticket—

Red Wigglers, the Cadillac of Worms. Because you never know when you’re going to fish in Wawanosh Drain.

DC-3A Great Lakes Aviation.

Scottsdale Aviation.

The Sarnia Airport claims hundreds of thousands of trips in 2019. This seems like nonsense, what is a ‘catchment area’ and how can the local population produce 472,000 trips.

The last air carrier at Sarnia Airport operated aircraft very similar to the Jetstream.

Images. Top photo. Alan Wilson, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories abounding upon Amazon.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

Go Deep: What Would Happen if Imperial Oil Left Sarnia? Louis Shalako.

The Sarnia site, the St. Clair River in the background. Photo from CanadianFuels website.

Louis Shalako

“To engage in idle speculation is the mark of a free man.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero.

What would happen if Imperial Oil shut down their Sarnia plant and moved production elsewhere?

This article relies on sheer speculation.

However, there is some evidence, not so much of their intentions, as for an ongoing process.

The company recently took down the big smokestack, visible for some miles when entering the city along Confederation Street.

The old tool crib, machine shop and warehouse building is gone. Old oil tanks, the ones that appeared to have been constructed of large ceramic blocks, are gone. The bottling plant, built in the 1980s, which was meant to bottle the new-at-the-time synthetic oils, is gone. As an employee of a company in the industrial door business, we supplied hollow metal doors and frames for that plant. I knew a guy who drove a big rig. All he did was move trailers around the property—empty trailers go up to the loading dock, full trailers are pulled out and lined up in rows for the ‘real’ truckers who would take them on from there.

The Esso ‘low density polyethylene’ plant, across Vidal Street from the refinery proper, also built in the 1980s, appears to be largely gone—it’s kind of hard to say for sure, from looking at Google Maps, but the street grid, all behind wire and on private property, has some empty blocks. Google Maps isn't always very up-to-date. Those blocks show signs of something being taken away, perhaps storage tanks, perhaps redundant production units. We supplied many, many overhead doors for a train loading dock and factory area. We supplied doors, frames and hardware for the plant. Going on forty year-old memories is not very reliable. It might be better to say that I just don’t know about that one and cannot find any confirmation online.

Imperial Oil has taken out a number of storage tanks, which used to be to the west of south Indian Road. Historically, the company operated a small fleet of tankers, plying the Great Lakes. Nowadays, fuels are mostly transported by rail, by road, or by pipeline.

Now, the provincial government has halted production at the Ineos/Styrolution plant due to high benzene emissions, and just the other day, the federal government issued an order for all Chemical Valley plants to reduce benzene emissions.

The tanks in the centre of the photo are gone...

The Imperial Oil refinery is historical. It is the oldest oil refinery in Canada, maybe even the world, but the focus of those activities has shifted to a large extent to western Canada.

There’s a lot more competition these days. There are also two or three other refineries locally, Shell and Suncor, and the one on Plank Road which used to be Dome Petroleum. Now it is 'Plains-Midstream', whatever the hell that means.

With a large footprint, and a fair bit of open space, a refinery can be rebuilt, it can be upgraded, a newer plant could simply be built on the same property—there is a power generation plant onsite. Those no longer rely on coal, all such plants locally, have been converted to gas. That being said, there is nothing to stop the company from shutting down much of the plant, maybe even most of the plant, and keeping a few such assets in play. The local operation could sell power into the grid, or to other Chemical Valley operations. One, specialized unit could produce one, specialized feedstock for local customers. There was a news story where the Shell refinery was up for sale. I forget the price, something like $250 million. There were no takers—no one wanted it.

Most recently, Imperial Oil announced a rationalization plan, with the result that the Research Centre is shutting down locally, with operations to be transferred to the southern U.S. Their all-weather simulator, built back in the 1980s, where vehicles and lubricants were tested in arctic and high-temperature conditions, (using the new synthetic oil) would now appear to be redundant…it was a source of pride at the time, as was their new synthetic oil product line.

There are signs, the problem is how to interpret them.

It is true, that the plant is close to eastern markets. This is relevant when it comes to gasoline, diesel and jet-type fuels, which are more akin to good old kerosene. It is also true that the fate of Line 5, which crosses the Straits of Mackinac, the State of Michigan, and the St. Clair River, remains up in the air pending court rulings and no doubt subsequent appeals. What would happen to Chemical Valley as a whole if Line 5 was shut down. Bearing in mind the new Nova plant in St. Clair Township will rely on feedstocks from some source, what would happen if any one of their major suppliers were to shut down. That plant represents a $2.5 billion investment or thereabouts.

***

Louis. Going deep on pure speculation. Yet the conclusion is obvious...

Historically, plants and factories have come and gone. Prestolite in Point Edward manufactured electric coils and windings for electric motors and devices related to the auto industry. Holmes Foundry was a subsidiary of American Motors, taken over when AMC became part of Chrysler. When the plant was shut down, the site was mostly dismantled, with the eastern end looking like a post-apocalyptic wasteland with partially-demolished buildings and overgrown with trees and scrub. A friend’s first job was at a place called Mueller Brass, where he was a ‘nipple-polisher’, according to him. The company made brass fittings for the auto and hardware industry.

Fibreglas Canada is gone. The small, old-fashioned plant produced several types of pink and white wool insulation, as well as acoustic ceiling tiles and pipe insulation. Production was simply moved south of the border. The old Polysar, a Crown Corporation formed in early World War Two to produce synthetic rubber, was broken up, with various elements taken over by NOVA, Bayer and BASF to my own recollection. Many of those units have been decommissioned although some industrial operations continue on the site. The Ineos/Styrolutions plant is, in fact, the old Polysar Butyl II and Styrene II plants under new management—and yes, I helped build those plants too.

Dow Chemical decommissioned their Sarnia facility after seventy years in Chemical Valley, although the company has returned to the area with an operation in Corunna.

The Ontario Hydro coal-fired generating plant has been demolished. Welland Chemical, in response to a strike, packed up and left in the middle of the night or so it seemed. The old Ethyl Corporation used to produce lead additives for fuel—a changing regulatory environment pretty much killed leaded fuels, and some other company may have taken over certain assets which may have been useful or adaptable to their own needs. Holmes Insulation was taken over by a Finnish company, and then somebody else, and it’s one of those sites which seems barely active on a casual drive-by.

Coca-Cola had a tiny little bottling plant near the intersection of Indian Road and Confederation Street. The building is still there, behind the Tim Horton’s. The small size gives an easy answer as to why it is gone: it was simply more efficient to produce the product in a larger plant, somewhere else, and truck the product into town (or to a distribution centre), from there.

In light of global climate change, it is simply inevitable that certain refining operations must fall by the wayside, somewhere, someday.

The oldest refinery in Canada might very well be gone in five, ten, fifteen or twenty years. It will almost certainly be gone in thirty.

END

Imperial Oil Research Moving to U.S. (Sarnia News Today)

Imperial to Begin Demolition of Stack. (Sarnia Journal)

Oil Blending and Packing Operation to Close. (Sarnia Observer)

Shell Refinery Sale Plan Scrapped. (Reuters)

Tower Falls at Imperial Oil Sarnia. (Global News)

No Charges for Imperial Oil Despite Massive Fire. (Global News)

Feds Extend Benzene Restrictions for Two Years. (National Observer)

About the author. 

Once upon a time, Louis Shalako worked for Bice Specialties, Wilding Industrial Doors, and Cecco, (briefly), in the industrial doors trade. He worked for C.H. Heist, mostly in industrial vacuum work as well as high-pressure water-blasting. He spent ten weeks on the end of a shovel, hand-digging around pipes and cables, working for Dow Chemical in their Utility/Construction labour force. He worked for Lyndon Security, working a gate at the Shell Marketing Terminal and one or two other places. As an unarmed, uniformed security guard, Louis picked up the weekly mail pouch from Holmes Foundry and took it over the river to the Port Huron Michigan Post Office, which saved the company a day or two on mail delivery. The fun part was, they provided a Jeep Cherokee owned by the company for the trip. (Bridge fare was still fifty cents back then.) As a cab driver, he delivered overtime meals to company gates and drove workers all over the county, after overtime, having missed their car-pool. He worked for Fibreglas Canada for about a year and worked the Cabot Carbon strike as a security guard in 1986. He has been in and out of every plant in the valley as well as many other industrial operations in southern Ontario cities and towns.

 

Louis has books and stories in ebook and audiobook format available from Google Play.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.